What are we to make of Justine Henin-Hardenne? She may be the most apprehensive, even self-destructive, warrior in sports. The undersized Belgian held tennis fans in her sway for most of the weekend, then gave it away in the end.
If you weren’t following along—and I had trouble myself after breaking both my remotes watching my Philadelphia Eagles give their own game away on Sunday—Henin-Hardenne came back to win two singles matches in the Fed Cup finals against her Italian opponents, then retired with a knee injury during the deciding doubles match. In the third set. In front of her home crowd. To give Italy its first Cup. This is not absolutely unprecedented—Pete Sampras retired in a singles match against Sweden in the 1997 Davis Cup final—but it was hard to get your head around, particularly since Henin-Hardenne seemed to be moving reasonably well just before calling it quits.
Henin-Hardenne said that she was injured during her singles match earlier in the day. She came out for the dubs, which she wasn’t originally scheduled to play, with her leg taped. But I hadn’t noticed any limits on her movement when she was coming back from 3-5 down in the second set Sunday to beat Francesca Schiavone. In fact, I was amazed at her performance, as I had been the day before when she’d done pretty much the same thing to Flavia Pennetta.
So let’s start at the beginning. Coming after the wide-open expanses and glitzy stage of the U.S. Open, the setting for the Fed Cup final looked particularly cramped. It was held in a small, jammed, thunderstix-filled arena in Charleroi, Belgium. The surface was a shiny, slick, dark-blue hard court. In the first match, Schiavone dismissed an overmatched Kirsten Flipkens as expected. It’s amazing how some sure-shot juniors pan out, and others don’t. Flipkens was at the top of the junior game a couple years ago, but she simply didn’t have enough pop on her strokes to stay with her Italian opponents, including the less-than-forbidding Mara Santangelo yesterday.
After Schiavone’s win, Pennetta came out and rolled to a 3-0 lead over a tight and pressing Henin-Hardenne. I haven’t watched Pennetta much, but she has an attractive game. She can reliably crack a two-handed backhand, she has a penetrating serve, and her forehand, while it can go off, is appealingly loose and slappy.
But Pennetta gagged badly Saturday. She lost five straight games to go down 5-3 in the first. Then, after getting back to 4-5 and break point, she hit pushed a tight backhand and eventually lost the game. In the second set she started dictating again and reached 5-2. This is where Henin-Hardenne did “what all champions do,” as the saying goes, winning even when she wasn’t at her best.
The Belgian had been playing poorly, trying to force the action to the point where she looked like she was getting ahead of herself on her forehand. She doesn’t use much backswing on the stroke in the first place, but now she was dispensing with it altogether and opening up way too early. But she kept grinding and eventually won a poorly played game at 2-5. It was enough to set Henin-Hardenne in motion. By 5-5, everything was clicking for her, and Pennetta was where you’d expected her to be all day, on her heels.
It’s hard to remember many top players changing their games as much as Henin-Hardenne has recently. She’s got a revamped, abbreviated service motion, and she’s coming in behind it suddenly. From what I know, these are the ideas of her coach, Carlos Rodriguez; he pushes her to do new things, and she’s willing to try them. Both ideas paid off when she served for the match at 6-5. Henin-Hardenne hit a superb drop volley winner at 15-30 and ended it with two strong serves.
Is one day enough to constitute “history”? If it is, history repeated itself—precisely—when Henin-Hardenne played Schiavone the next day. The Belgian again came out tight and pressing, but she snuck out of the first set when Schiavone gagged two volleys at 4-5. Naturally, Henin-Hardenne went down 1-4 in the second before she relaxed and began to play. Like a writer at deadline, this weekend she seemed able to perform only when she needed to perform. It was the old “you can’t win until you can lose” idea of competition.
By the time Henin-Hardenne was back at 4-5 and trying to break, she had shaken off all her nerves and whatever else was constricting her and reached full flight. On the first point, she hit a volley winner and pumped her fist at Kim Clijsters, who had appeared in the front row Sunday. On the second point, she rolled a backhand pass for a winner. On the third, she scrambled forward to hit her trademark touch lob to go up 0-40. Schiavone tried a between-the-legs shot but sent it wide. She was toast. Henin-Hardenne’s toughness in the clutch seemed confirmed once again.
Flipkens was also toast in the next match, going down meekly in the third set. In the deciding doubles, Henin-Hardenne was not quite her fluid self, but the Belgians managed to get the match to a third set. That’s when H-H appeared to push forward on her knee a bit too far while running forward for a volley. She called a trainer, had her leg massaged, then came out and played two points before calling it quits. During the last point, she had served and then moved well enough to make it to the net, and she continued to walk without any noticeable pain (at least on TV) after retiring.
Like Henin-Hardenne’s retirement in the Aussie Open final, this was a mystery. Even more so, perhaps, because everyone in the building had a stake in her continuing, and she had fought so hard and so well to put her country in a position to win. She was the reason they were there in the first place. I don’t know how her leg felt, obviously, but I’m inclined to say it was a manifestation of Henin-Hardenne’s well-known “Grand Slam nerves,” where she stresses herself into exhaustion or an injury by tournament’s end. Even in the lone Slam final that she won this year, at Roland Garros, Henin-Hardenne looked like she was on the verge of collapse at certain points. You could hear her breathing hard halfway up the arena. In all the big events, she winds herelf up tight and may just snap at the worst possible moment.
Or, alternatively, this injury, along with the others—she complained of back and shoulder problems while reaching the final of the Open last weekend—is the result of Henin-Hardenne’s playing style. She certainly flings her small body into every shot. Whatever you think of Justine—I’ll always enjoy watching her play—she’s become an adventure in 2006.
The Italians did their share of choking this weekend, but they deserve the win because they never stopped competing. Even when everything looked lost, and they were unable to close out a match against Henin-Hardenne, they fought and smiled and cheered each other happily. Forfeit or not, it was nice to see them go nuts at the end.